Drive on the game further by portraying himself as the silent, violent

protagonist.

“I guess the reason why most of my videos are somewhat original is I want to try

something different each video. And for someone who makes these types of

videos, it’s not really fun to edit the same thing over and over again,” Gerards said.

If AncientReality is the Vegeta of montage parodies, Senpai Kush is its Goku. The

undisputed Greatest of All Time in some circles, if only for his MLG Mario video,

Kush started making videos when he was 14.

“In the beginning, montage parodies were real easy to make and were supposed to have bad editing. That was the joke, after all.”

“I would spend endless hours on YouTube as a kid. VFX channels like Freddiew inspired me to learn how to edit,” he said. “I would create short action films with my friends with terrible cameras and poor acting.”

Kush made his first montage parody in April 2014: “Kicked in the head by a train (MLG version),” a parody of a viral video showing a man filming himself as a leg sticking out from a passing train collected his face. In August, Kush created “MLG Mario” It begins like any Super Mario Bros. game, with the orange-and-red plumber sprite running through the two dimensions of the Mushroom Kingdom. Only when he jumps on a pipe, he’s sniped by Bowser.

From there, it becomes a side-scrolling parody of Call of Duty, in which Mario is powered up by the disembodied head of Valve’s Gabe Newell, travels through a pipe of Mountain Dew, transforms into a Runescape wizard, and eventually defeats Bowser.

“The meta was forever changing,” Kush said. “Montage parodies lost their way

and had begun to parody themselves. The jokes became less original and

eventually the majority of new content was just a screen shaking vigorously with

absurdly loud music, which even I’m guilty of including in some of my videos.

That being said, there are still a variety of montage parody creators that produce

decent, original content. It was very interesting watching the huge impact the

fast growth of the community had on the meta.”

Kush grew tired of montage parody tropes so quickly that it began to take a toll

on his own work. Pushed to make something possessed of the originality he

wanted to see in other videos, he became a perfectionist.

“My own videos were

never finished, in my opinion,” Kush said. “There was always something I could add. When I

saw mistakes in my uploads it drove me absolutely crazy.”

Now, Kush is branching out, working on “a variety of comedy-based VFX videos”

to further his editing skills.

“These could potentially still have montage parody

elements implemented in them,” Kush told the Daily Dot. “Only time will tell.”

This is the hidden bonus in

montage parodies. Just as MySpace gave kids a shot at learning HTML, montage

parodies have put the onus on some folks to learn their way around an editing

suite, teaching themselves skills that might turn into a career their moms could

be proud of.

This all culminated last year in a montage parody video game. Titled GAME OF